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The Reusable Rocket is Now a Reality

Blue Origins after its historic landing back at the launch site in Texas. Courtesy Blue Origin.

The folks at Blue Origin made science fiction come to life on November 23rd with the launch of the New Shepard space vehicle. It’s designed to launch, deploy its crew capsule payload, and then land safely back on its retractable legs. The test, which took place in Texas, looked almost too easy — but it showed that reusable rockets are here to stay, and that’s a HUGE advance in spacecraft engineering in the current round of development.

Settling a rocket back onto the ground “bottom first” on its retractable legs is not an easy task. It can be blown off course if winds kick up, and of course, there are the technical challenges of making sure all the rockets and electronics work in synchrony to guide the rocket back down over a narrow path. As you can see from the picture, the rocket did fine, landing right on the pad, with only a few burn marks on its rear end to show for its trouble.

Watch this video of the test provided by the Blue Origin team. It’s very cool.

Anybody who has read science fiction or seen SF movies with rockets routinely settling back to Earth after their journeys will recognize the beauty of what Jeff Bezos’s team has achieved. It’s another step into making space more accessible, particularly inspiring after the retirement of the space shuttle fleet a few years ago. In the first Space Race, there wasn’t the time to properly develop the “land the rocket back on the ground” capability, although there were early tests of reusable rockets with the DC-X by the folks at McDonnell-Douglas in the 1990s (thanks to Aldo Spadoni for pointing that out). But, the expendable rocket carried through all the world’s launches. Today, that’s changing — why throw away rockets if you can save money by safely reusing them? That’s what this test (and SpaceX’s tests) are trying to prove.

This test took place at the Blue Origin test site in Texas, and the missile reached an altitude of 329,839 feet (100.5 meters). At that altitude, the crew capsule separated from the rocket and deployed parachutes for safe landing. The rocket then reversed course and settled back onto the pad in an amazing controlled landing.

So, this is a game-changer for space flight. It means that rockets can be re-used. After a thorough set of test flights like this one, Blue Origin’s vehicle can begin taking astronauts to space for a wide selection of crewed missions. This is something that the SpaceX team (led by Elon Musk) also is trying to do, but their attempted landings on a floating barge have been unsuccessful. The last one saw their rocket get back to the barge, but in the last few seconds, the vehicle blew over. Since SpaceX has a contract with NASA to provide crew launch capabilities with its rocket, this latest test ups the ante in the private business space race. Stay tuned!

Pluto’s Tiny Moon Ready for a Close-up

This image of Kerberos was created by combining four individual Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) pictures taken on July 14, approximately seven hours before New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, at a range of 245,600 miles (396,100 km) from Kerberos. Courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

It may not look like much, but this is the long-awaited view of Pluto’s tiny moon Kerberos. This little place is about 12 kilometers across, and has what looks like a double-lobed shape — as if two tiny chunks of “stuff” had slammed together to make a bigger one. The bigger of the two lobes is about kilometers across and the smaller is about 3 kilometers and the images and data taken with New Horizons show that Kerberos is highly reflective and coated with what appears to be water ice.

Pluto has five moons — Charon, Styx, Nyx, Hydra and Kerberos. All of them were imaged by the spacecraft, which is still streaming data to Earth (and will be for the next year or so).

What’s Up with New Horizons?

Since I haven’t written about Pluto and New Horizons for a while, let’s take a look at what else is happening with the mission. First, the spacecraft just did the first of four maneuvers to put the spacecraft on a path toward 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object about a billion miles away from Pluto. The mission team is preparing a proposal for those observations, which will take place on January 1, 2019 as the spacecraft flies by on its way through the Belt. Three more trajectory course correction maneuvers will take place in the next two weeks.

New Horizons position relative to Pluto on October 22, 2015. Courtesy New Horizons mission. (Click to embiggen.)

Second, as I mentioned above, as it flies away from Pluto, the spacecraft is playing back the data from the July encounter and will be doing so until autumn 2016. The images and data are coming back at around a 1.12 kilobits per second to an antenna at the Deep Space Network.

Finally, each week the mission team is releasing some pretty amazing images from the Pluto flyby. Check out the science image gallery at the mission’s Web site, and browse to your heart’s content. I guarantee it — you’ll be agog at what this fast-moving little mission has found at Pluto. And, if all goes well, we’ll get to see another KBO in just a few years. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Blue Origin brings Science Fiction to Life

The Reusable Rocket is Now a Reality

Meet Mysterious Kerberos

Pluto’s Tiny Moon Ready for a Close-up

What’s Up with New Horizons?

Exploring Science and the Cosmos